Jim and I are going to stay here a few days longer to finish the work that is begun. We hope to meet and talk with as many of the men implicated in my cousin’s lawlessness as is possible. What the result will be I cannot say. We do not consider ourselves in any danger whatever, though we are not taking chances. If all goes well we shall be back within a few days. I hope you are not missing Jim too much at the roundup. Sincerely, NED BANNISTER She liked the letter because there was not a hint of the relationship between them to be read in it. He had guarded her against the chance of its falling into the wrong hands and creating talk about them. She turned to Hughie. “Can you ride?” “In a way, ma’am. I can’t ride like these men.” His glance indicated a cow-puncher pounding past after a wild steer that had broken through the cordon of riders and was trying to get away. “Do you want to learn?” “I’d like to if I had a chance,” he answered wistfully. “All right. You have your chance. I’ll see that Mr. Austin finds something for you to do. From to-day you are in my employ.” She rode back to the ranch in the late afternoon, while the sun was setting in a great splash of crimson. The round-up boss had hinted that if she were nervous about riding alone he could find it convenient to accompany her. But the girl wanted to be alone with her own thoughts, and she had slipped away while he was busy cutting out calves from the herd. It had been a wonderful relief to her to find that _her_ Ned Bannister was the one that had survived in the conflict, and her heart sang a paean of joy as she rode into the golden glow of the westering sun. He was alive—to love and be loved. The unlived years of her future seemed to unroll before her as a vision. She glowed with a resurgent happiness that was almost an ecstasy. The words of a bit of verse she had once seen—a mere scrap from a magazine that had stuck in an obscure corner of her memory—sang again and again in her heart: Life and love And a bright sky o’er us, And—God take care Of the way before us! Ah, the way before them, before her and her romance-radiating hero! It might be rough and hilly, but if they trod it together—Her tangled thoughts were off again in another glad leap of imagination. The days passed somehow. She busied herself with the affairs of the ranch, rode out often to the scenes of the cattle drives and watched the round-up, and every twenty-four hours brought her one day nearer to his return, she told herself. Nora, too, was on the lookout under her longlashed, roguish eyelids; and the two young women discussed the subject of their lovers’ return in that elusive, elliptical way common to their sex. No doubt each of these young women had conjectured as to the manner of that homecoming and the meeting that would accompany it; but it is safe to say that neither of them guessed in her day-dreams how it actually was to occur.